- Programming
Coarse Programmer's guide to Python's stringy bits
Strings should be easy to understand. They're just text, right? In this article I go under the hood of Python's unicode strings, and find out why I keep getting UnicodeEncodeError.
- Programming
Coarse Programmer's guide to reactive UIs: Intercooler.js
I don't want a UI that feels like it's from 2003, but I really don't want to fiddle with a javascript framework. Intercooler.js offers a simple and somewhat coarse alternative.
- Programming
- django
- wagtail
Wagtail: replicating a database with fixtures
Replicating your development database on your production server isn't as easy as copy-paste. A bug in Wagtail makes it doubly difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide that worked for me.
- Programming
- Haiti
50 lines of code behind one line of reporting
Education in Haiti is unequal, but how unequal? To find out, I scoured the internet for data, then applied a little basic coding to get an answer. The techniques I used were simple but come from the world of programming, not journalism. A simple parable about the use of coding skills in a journalist's daily work.
- Programming
Coarse Programmer's Guide to Scraping: Know your URLs
Scraping news websites is a research superpower... in the right hands. In the wrong hands you could end up downloading the whole internet.